Platinum Arts Sandbox is a free educational tool which puts tools in the hands of children (or adults alike) to create their own 3D worlds.

Platinum Arts Sandbox makes creation of your own worlds really easy by basically pushing and pulling areas of the world using just your mouse. There is no complicated GUI with a million buttons. Just you, your mouse and a few keys from your keyboard.

There is a wide array of features, textures and models available to the user. A basic menu appears when you press the escape key on your keyboard, which incidentally floats in  3D space. This menu contains a few things like loading/saving worlds and changing a few options. But the rest is as simple as painting an area of the landscape with your mouse and then raising it by scrolling your mouse wheel. Terrain can be made more realistic by using the height map tool by again painting the area you wish to affect, press H and then use the mouse scroll wheel to create a bumpy surface. There are also quite a few preset models such as various trees, waving grass and a park bench. These can all be positioned and rotated in your world.

Other features that can be added to the map include teleports, moving platforms, lighting effects, particles, waterfall, water and lava.

When you have got used to the world creation tools there is also more available utilising a scripting language. This gives you more control over your 3D world such as controlling lights.

Platinum Arts Sandbox also allows you to collaborate with other people on the same map. This is a slightly more tricky setup but basic involves the use of a server which all players connect to.

Models can be created to add into your world by using a program such as Blender 3D. Models can be exported in Blender to an MD2, MD3 and MD5 format which can be read by Platinum Arts Sandbox.